RE: Copyright in China

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Dear Joe.

A very easy question. In the US, under the plan under discussion, it will
be the copy at NIH which guarantees authenticity for the covered material.
In any similiar plan, it will be a similar authoritative archive.  
Tampering will be prevented by multiple mirror sites, such as already
exist for important repositories such as arXiv.  There was some discussion
last week about the need for publishers' archival copy to be in more than
one country;  the same logic holds.

The limiting factor on the spread of tyranny is not the scholarly
information system, current or proposed. Our true concern in this regard
lies elsewhere.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Sun 10/24/2004 9:06 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Copyright in China
 
The following appears as an editorial in today's NY Times
(http://nytimes.com, registration required).  The topic is copyright.  We
should expect to see more abuses of this kind in the future, exponentially
more, as the Internet makes piracy and the alteration of text much easier
than they are in hardcopy.  Open Access documents will be particularly
susceptible to this kind of abuse--which, I hasten to add, is not an
argument against OA but a plea for careful (and costly?) management of all
digital materials.  The editorial is written with winning humor ("'The
town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui'"), but it takes
little to imagine papers on controversial scientific subjects (say, stem
cell research) getting distorted in awful ways.

My meat-and-potatoes question of the morning is, Who will pay for the
management of textual integrity when economic incentives are removed from
the equation?

Joe Esposito